This article about the focus feature on the Roon blog recommends:
With careful curation of your Roon Library, Focus becomes an oracle of exploration and discovery. For instance, instead of adding the top folder of your digital music files library consider adding a genre subfolder instead. Instantly your genre-themed music folders are poised for treasure hunting. Focus unlocks the connections that make music spellbinding. You’ll never waste time on aimless folder browsing again.
Now I wonder how to change my library from one top folder to the existing genre subfolders instead with keeping all my library data like edits, favorites etc.
Very simple, create the new subgenre folders and move your music files into their respective folder.
However, it can take some time for Roon to adapt its database, so my advice:
A) Make a complete new backup (Force baclup)
B) Make another new backup on another drive
Start small with 1 new subgenre folder, and move e.g. 5 albums in there. So how that goes.
When that is Ok, give it a go with e.g. 20 albums.
When that is OK, go ahead for that complete subfolder.
Remember: allow Roon some time to deal with it.
2)When your 1st subgenre is finished, go ahead with the next one.
3) Continue for all your subgenre folders, but one by one.
I do not know how many albums there are in your library. It is really huge, do not hesitate to force a intermediate backup if you are halfway.
Well, all the subgenre folders exist already in the top folder, because it was my way of organizing my music before I started using Roon.
My library consists of 1570 albums and 13192 tracks, so it’s not huge.
Right now in /settings/storage only my top folder is added.
As far as I understand I would need to add all the subgenre folders separately in /settings/storage and after I added them all I would disable the top folder?
Afterwards everything should be the same except that I can sort by subgenre folder in the focus feature?
No, not like that, as you are going to force Roon to add all your albums a second time. Roon will scan both your top directorty and your subgenres folders.
The safest way, I believe, is to create a new top folder (e.g. TOP1) , move 1 subgenre folder to the new TOP1 folder, and then in Roon add the full path subgenre folder in TOP1 in /settings/storage.
Try the smallest one out first.
And please do not forget to make backups first.
You do not need to change any folder structure to use focus really not sure what advantage this would bring to anything other than cause you more work. If you add each one as a storage location you can focus by that location but if your metadata is correct then why won’t genre as focus not do the same anyway.
